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Weight Loss is More Than Just Science, It's An Art!Wed, 02 Mar 2016 20:14:03 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.447580875A New Beginninghttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheArtOfWeightLoss/~3/K3ymLDxx_cA/
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I started the Art of Weight Loss officially about two years ago, and traffic has grown exponentially since then, getting feedback from people, learning about people wanted and what they needed.

For a few months now I’ve had a monkey on my back.

On one hand I wanted to provide an online resource that was highly specific, targeted and appropriate for people with weight loss ambitions and I will continue to do so.

The subject is actually near and dear to my heart, because the topic of obesity hits hard to home.

I’ve luckily never dealt with personal obesity, at my greatest weight I was about 190 lbs (I’m 6’1″) and 7% body fat, which doesn’t exactly inspire a lot of common ground between me and the people I work with regularly.

What most people don’t know is that my parents pushed me into a life of athletics and relatively healthy eating, in part I think due to their own situation.

They both may not like me saying this publicly but both of my parents would be considered overweight, my dad in particular, my mom manages it better and took it upon herself to instil good eating habits in her children, even if they were only based on the knowledge at the time — which was ‘whole carbohydrate’ intensive, and fat is bad for you but that’s a different story.

We for the most part, had very little sugar growing up, no trans-fat, very little saturated fat, did not eat much of anything deep-fried (to this day I still prefer a salad to french fries), no white bread, only whole grain cereals like cheerios, raisin bran, etc… and well you get the picture.

It’s become a big part of my mission to help others not have to deal with the concerns and worries I have for the health and specifically longevity of close loved ones.

On the other hand, I’ve spent my entire professional career up until this point learning about fitness, coaching others about fitness and how to get the results people are looking for in a way that doesn’t kill Peter to pay Paul.

I generally abhor the current quick-fix situation the majority of North American’s find themselves in when it comes to managing their weight and their health.

A situation that leaves us fatter than ever before, though potentially satisfied in the short-term with our aesthetic appearance at least.

I never want the people I work with to give up their long-term health and well-being for the short-lived thrill of having a six-pack.

I have no intention of stopping in this mission.

I think if I really put my head down I can build something remarkable in the fitness industry that could significantly reduce or reverse the current trend towards obesity (something I’m deeply concerned about) the World over.

In this journey, I’ve learned that there are several foundational elements that have to be in place for things like weight loss to occur.

Understanding that skill development is the best long-term solution.

Know that ‘change’ is needed and the majority of that change is psychological. Mindset is definitely the most important part of turning this situation around.

Habits and ultimately our behaviors are the main contributing forces to weight gain, thus the most impactful way to lose weight (or any other kind of physical change objective) is to develop new habits and behaviors that contribute to that desired outcome.

Change best occurs by doing one thing at a time (most people take on too much and that’s why they fail)

You have to learn nutrition management skills, that suit your lifestyle, your expectations and your physiology.

You have to learn ‘how’ to train, don’t just follow programs mindlessly that the fitness industry creates for you

Not really that many right?

Throughout my career, I’ve also helped people with athletic performance and weight gain, and a recent revelation has convinced me that these foundational elements transcend the specific outcomes, whether you seek weight loss, weight gain, a healthy lifestyle or improved performance the initial commonality of skills you need to learn is surprising.

If you learn these elements and learn them well, almost any physical change is possible and becomes far more easy to maintain.

As I’ve detailed here on the blog before, you have to meet yourself where you’re at and the overwhelming majority of people who need the most help with weight loss and their health are taking on exercise programs, and rigid diets that far exceed where their current level of skill is at.

This is why I’ve started the ambitious plan of developing the ‘Fitness Belts‘ as a way of identifying their current level of skill, and then providing a progressive approach to develop higher and higher levels of skill.

I’m not saying I’ve learned it all yet, but I have learned that in order for me to help more people I need to give more specific and useful content that addresses these foundational elements of fitness and it’s all boiled down to a new concept I’m calling:

In the weeks ahead, I will begin gradually transitioning most of the content you find on website to it’s new home there.

The Art of Weight Loss will continue to exist, but it will be turned into the main page for the weight loss coaching program(s) I plan on launching in the near future.

This is a risky move as Google has been tracking The Art of Weight Loss for sometime now, and I believe the great content I provide has been a huge part of the growth of this blog over the last 2 years by someone with very little blogging experience.

It is my hope that you really like the content on this blog that you will join me at my new home and share with your friends the new content I have planned for everyone.

Skill Based Fitness will be the showcase for the the systems and frameworks for coaching and training others in the fine artsof physical growth and maintenance that I have been developing for the last two years.

While it’s not done yet, I’m ready to share it with the masses and gradually start building the new Art of Weight Loss website.

In the months ahead at SBF will be organizing the content better, to make it more streamlined and accessible.

All of the content you see on the AofWL, particularly the great courses I spent a great deal of time building will be found on this new website too, specifically here.

I wanted to formally thank you for all the support you’ve provided this blog over the years and I look forward to sharing this new chapter with all of you over at the new site.

I also would like to thank you for your patience as I get the new site up and all the old content converted for the new site.

Some things may be more difficult to find, so I encourage you to please contact me if you need help with anything at any time.

Thanks Again!

]]>http://artofweightlossblog.com/a-new-beginning/feed/03756http://artofweightlossblog.com/a-new-beginning/Am I Genetically Doomed to Be Overweight?http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheArtOfWeightLoss/~3/cxBMHqP03QQ/
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I’ll cut straight to the chase.

I can’t prove, nor can I disprove this notion, and I don’t think science can either at this point but I can provide some really good insights for you.

1) We have yet to identify any ‘big’ or ‘small’ or ‘fat’ or ‘skinny’ gene or genes, or combination of genes.

2) But this doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist…

3) Even if they did, that’s not how Genes work within human physiology.

We tend to think of obesity or being overweight as being a modern disease but this isn’t the case.

Throughout history we have always had people who are larger and people who are skinnier and it certainly had nothing to do with the common assailants we often blame today for making half the population above a 25 Body Mass Index (BMI – the standard method of measurement for these stats):

Too much food availability

Too much processed food

Too much refined and processed sugars (simple carbohydrates)

Too many processed fats

Sedentary lifestyles, etc…

This leads many people to assume that it must be genetic.

There must be some genetic reason I’m overweight/can’t lose weight/struggle to maintain my weight/etc…

I’ll get to why or why not, but I cannot imply that overweight people have always existed strictly as a matter of genes, because that’s not it.

Obesity is a multi-centric problem, meaning there are multiple reasons people gain weight, keep the weight on, have trouble losing weight and so on and so on…

You can’t isolate just one solution for everyone, because everyone needs a slightly different solution or combination of solutions (which is why coaching can be so important).

Now there might be that there is one really solid solution out there for you that will make a significant difference, maybe you need to cut sugar out, or processed fat out, or liquid calories and you get a significant benefit but in most cases it’s a combination of small changes that add up to the outcome you’re looking for and genes are no different.

The notion that genes are a sole contributor to weight gain just doesn’t add up, even if you look to history for answers.

For the people in history who were overweight, its just as perfectly possible that they ate more food than they needed and didn’t move around much either.

See we didn’t know then, what we know now; That being overweight is potentially worse for your health than smoking (heck, 70 years ago some said smoking was good for you).

For centuries in many cultures you were believed to be of good stock if you were heavier and thus well fed, so it seems likely that many people chose to actually pursue obesity on some level so as to show off a level of status to the world.

Many people of a higher level of wealth, or those who wanted to showcase socially that they were of a higher status than they might not be, were overweight because it proved you could afford abundance.

It may even have been considered ‘healthy’ at some point to pursue that additional weight.

This is very similar to skin tone and it’s influence on status within cultures.

A century ago people who were tanned implied that they were of low-working-class status because they ‘had’ to be exposed to the sun all day, while the wealthier people tended to be very pale.

Both of these status claims (colour of skin and weight) are actually presently a part of a few existing cultures around the globe.

People in Indonesia, and other parts of South-East Asia, for instance desire whiter skin and whiter skin implies a higher status within the culture.

Heavier people in India up until perhaps recently were also considered to be of higher status if they were heavier (though other religious factors are also potentially at play here) because they could afford to eat well in abundance and not have to do a lot of physical work.

Generally we are shaped more by our perceptions of the world, our environment and our belief structures as opposed to fact.

So here is the kicker:

You’re not genetically doomed. Genes need to be expressed by your environment to make a significant difference. Tweet This…

This basically means they need exposure to a particular life stimulus for genes to either be triggered or remain passive; Often this stimulus needs to be repeated and extended exposure.

The good news is that once triggered, a gene or genetic combination can still revert back.

Meaning that even if you’ve gained weight over a long period of time, with enough appropriate work, you can regain a physical structure similar to what you may have already possessed at some moment in your life.

For example, scientists have identified a gene associated with violent behavior, but people only become violent after being exposed to a lot of severe violence themselves (generally some kind of abuse or witnessing abuse) and would otherwise never know they have this gene unless triggered by strong experience and environment.

These violent offenders can also be taught to be less violent over time, even though genetically speaking they have have a predisposition to being violent.

It works the same way for any potential genes and being overweight; Even if we do identify a gene or a series of genes that implies a predisposition to being overweight or being skinny, it doesn’t matter without the context of your environment.

From the womb if we are exposed to parents with inadequate nutrition levels (for an example see The Dutch Hungerwinter Study) this can influence our future development.

Of course the still great news is that this childhood and adolescent exposure can still be undone later in life.

Maybe that doesn’t mean fitting into your highschool prom dress or tuxedo perfectly again, but you can make some significant headway towards getting there via the appropriate and long-term environmental stimulus.

For the record I hadn’t read this particular article at the time I received this question, but I am very familiar with Mark Rippetoe’s work.

He is very well known in my field and has authored a couple of fantastic books including Starting Strength and Practical Programming (both with Lorie Kilgore and both of which I’ve read more than once — seriously they are good training books).

If you’re objective is weight loss then conditioning has more of a role than it may for other objectives, but not at the expense of developing the underlying fitness qualities.

What Mark is saying is that conditioning doesn’t have nearly as much transfer to other aspects of your life, particularly ‘performance’ as strength training would.

Mark does strength, and he does it big.

He was one of the first Americans to highlight strength as an important quality for training, particularly in athletics.

In the 1970’s most of the research, particularly into athletics were all about ‘aerobics’ and building the ‘aerobic’ base, which we now know is almost completely nonsense (though a lot of people still cling to this notion — and I still see a lot of injured or post-rehab endurance athlete clients to this date).

After 8 years now of training hundreds of different people, this is how I think training should evolve for the majority:

Mobility is always the thing that people struggle with the most, and by mobility, I don’t mean flexibility.

Mobility means the ability to move effectively and you can’t (or at least shouldn’t) build strength, power or endurance on top of bad movement.

Then strength/power, I didn’t want to get too technical with that drawing, but I would probably put that I think strength needs to be present before you can build ‘explosive’ power, which is a precursor to endurance (synonymous with ‘conditioning’).

*Note: Localized endurance which is a term you may hear around the fitness world, is what I would refer to as stability and stability is required for mobility, so please don’t confuse that with cardiorespiratory endurance or muscular endurance (high repetition training).

Now there are moments when you might be training all four of those components together, and a lot of other gray matter we could discuss but I want to focus specifically on stamina and muscular endurance (conditioning) as it pertains to other abilities in importance.

In recent years ‘conditioning’ has taken an undeserved limelight in the world of fitness.

Crossfit ‘WOD’s’ in particular and the current HIIT interval craze seem to have mostly contributed.

These are mostly power endurance ‘tests’ or ‘Muscular Endurance Tests,’ in that they typically force people to do high volumes of work, and with high volumes of work, you end up with fatigue and then typically bad form.

This is why rest is so important, in order to keep the quality high.

Intervals were all the rage for the last five to eight years (yet another form of conditioning) and now the new buzz word seems to be ‘finishers.’

I get it, it seems hard, therefore hardcore, and that’s cool right?

It may not be apparent when you’re 20 and feel invincible (believe me because I’ve been there and felt that) but thousands of repetition will take a toll on your body, particularly when you’re grinding through bad movement.

Let’s look at someone like Rafael Nadal, who has struggled with tendonitis and other chronic overuse injuries a lot lately and compare him to someone who executes nearly flawless tennis technique, like Roger Federer.

Roger’s technically stunning to watch, where as Rafael is a workhorse, even if he sacrifices good body position to make a shot.

While I admire work ethic, from my experience, Roger will feel a lot better 30 years from now than Rafael will (who will probably deal with multiple surgeries but at least extensive rehab).

Roger = Good Movement

Rafael = Sub-Par Movement

Now if you add a lack of strength to bad movement, you just doubled your chance of serious injury.

This is what Mark Rippetoe is getting at.

Strength training has more of a cascade effect into ‘conditioning’ or what I would term ‘Energy System Development’ than conditioning or ESD would have in the other direction.

People right now, are doing too much conditioning and focusing too much on it at the expense of these more important components of fitness.

You will lose strength and mobility, faster and more dramatically as you age, than you will lose cardiorespiratory fitness.

This is how I explain this concept to clients:

Imagine one person with a filled 12 oz cup and one with 12 oz of liquid in a 16 oz cup.

Theoretically the liquid represents the ability to do work (conditioning, endurance, stamina, whatever you want to call it), and the size of the cup reflects the strength of the individual.

Strength training increases the size of the cup and conditioning is what you fill it with.

The person with 12 oz of liquid in a 16 oz cup has more room for improvement with any work capacity even though they are presently operating at about the same level of work as the individual with the 12 oz cup.

This is why strength training improves every day life, more significantly than conditioning does or ever will.

The greater strength one has, the lower the percentage of work ‘conditioning’ becomes comparatively speaking.

For instance your 1 rep max of bench press is 300 lbs, and your push-up is roughly 150 lbs of work, representing 50% of the work.

The potential is there for this person to perform more push-ups relative to the person who can only bench 200 lbs, because in relation to the max tolerance the percentage of work is lower (50% instead of 75%).

In a sports analogy, the objective of ‘off-season’ training, should be to increase the size of the glass, while ‘pre-season’ work can focus on filling that glass with the appropriate liquid.

There is still the need to work on both at some point, but increasing the size of the glass is harder to do, has the greatest carry-over, and gives you more room to fill the glass with later for the ‘endurance’ component.

Strength development and motor skill development also lasts longer.

Energy system work is built very quickly, is very specific to the imposed demands, and is lost very quickly too.

How This Applies to You

This it not to say that conditioning training is entirely useless — or that strength is a god-send miracle either — because it can be useful for weight loss.

It just shouldn’t take precedence over moving well and being strong enough to tolerate high volumes of endurance work.

Have you ever been told that running, jumping, bounding, skipping or galloping is bad for your joints because it’s high impact?

What if I told you this wasn’t a full truth? What if I told you that it’s just like the myths that ‘fat is bad for you’ and ‘carbohydrates are bad for you?’

‘High-impact’ training, which is difficult to define in the first place, basically got a bad rep in the 1990’s and like fat, the myth just doesn’t want to seem to die out already.

At the time it was thought that high impact activities created too much ‘wear and tear’ on the joint, leading to a belief that it might also be leading to arthritis.

However, more recently a Stanford study published in 2008 showed that after tracking 1000 runners and non-runners for 21 years, the runners were no more likely to end up with arthritis than non-runners.

In fact, this research, and other research indicates that impact on the joint is a good thing, these researchers noted that the runners might actually delay the onset of conditions like arthritis and are better able to manage the condition by continuing to run.

Other positive observations have been noted in research as well.

Australian researchers (and others) have shown that people who participate in high impact activities have healthier and thicker bone cartilage in the knees.

This means an increased resistance to injury, an increase in quality of life and it can help you shed lbs and keep them off too.

Just like any other kind of exercise, the body’s response to impact is to adapt to it.

So by encouraging impact (appropriately) we are doing the body a vital service.

Impact is actually quite good for your joints because it increases ligament and tendon tensile strength, it increases cartilage formation in the joint — preventing degradation of cartilage essentially or even improving it once some degradation has occurred — it contributes to bone density increases — a good thing for an aging population, much like strength training — and improves joint capsule resistance to wear and tear.

It is often our natural psychological response to stop loading a joint after injury, with disease or even aging.

We feel as if we should ‘take it easy‘ when in fact this is often the worst thing we can be doing.

What we should be doing is rehabilitating back into high impact exercise for the preventative health benefits it provides (lifting in a heavy 3-6 reps range also shows similar benefits to ligament, tendon, cartilage and general bone health).

The positive benefits of loading a joint regularly (in a spectrum of loading patterns from low to high is essential) also include delaying or preventing bone diseases like osteoporosis and osteopenia.

Once you’ve learned how to move well again, via weight training, it’s time to add velocity to the movement and impact.

Running

There are people (often even in my profession) who actively tell others not to run because it’s ‘high-impact’ and I think this is a bad idea for your health, particularly your quality of life in the long-run.

People who abstain from impact, dramatically increase their injury potential doing simple things like playing with their kids, a game of touch football in the yard with family and other pleasant physically social activities.

Running is a primal movement pattern, it is hardwired as a part of the developmental process, all kids learn to run on their own, with no guidance from us.

Babies also learn to pull their heads back, lift there arms up and back from their stomach, they learn to roll over from side to side, they learn to push themselves up into a balance on all fours, then they naturally explore this range of movement, testing gravity through multiple planes like lifting one arm and or leg up at a time, then they start to link that movement together into crawling.

From crawling they figure out how to get into a half kneeling position, which looks curiously a lot like the bottom of a lunge and also a squat position, whereby they can pull themselves to standing, using assistance at first until they can stand on their own.

Then they tie that into walking, taking those first few steps until they crash down, repeatedly.

This all then ties into developing velocity of movement as they use that walking ability and transition into running, then jumping, then climbing, etc…

**Admittedly that is a big cole’s note on developmental kineisology but for the sake of simplicity I just want people to see the pattern of development there. Running is a natural part of the sequence for EVERY human being (those suffering from neurological dysfunctions or other developmental disorders like MS or CP, have difficulty expressing this through the developmental process – so my arguments exist for a ‘healthy’ population only. I’ll also note that the majority of us fall into the healthy category in this regard.

Part of a growing problem in Western societies, is that we move very little any more and stop expressing many of these abilities.

Why crawl anymore when you can walk?

Why do exercises on the floor when we can do them seated or standing?

Well because expressing movements that we’ve left behind is a key determining factor in maintaining good physical health.

All of those various components in the developmental process naturally train the body to move well holistically.

When we lose these basic abilities, it eventually translates into poor movement that we want to do, like walking, sitting up and down, lifting stuff off the floor, putting something high on a shelf, etc…

Poor movement, or biomotor ability is the leading cause of non-contact injury.

A growing trend in rehabilitation that is showing a lot of promise is moving back into these developmental patterns, to re-teach the body how to move appropriately and running is certainly a part of that mix.

More and more frequently physiotherapists, chiropractors and other medical professions are going back to the basics of things like ‘breathing on your stomach,’ ‘rolling over’ or, ‘crawling’ properly as a form of rehabilitating appropriate movement patterns that are ingrained within our motor system, just rarely used by us appropriately anymore.

Running is in this spectrum too, albeit at a slightly higher level of nervous system control and patterning at a higher velocity.

Running semi-regularly is a beneficial physical ability that is ours to lose if we don’t maintain it with proper training, progression, volume and appropriate surfaces (equipment usage).

Running is natural, and if you don’t use it, you lose it.

In the Long Term Athlete Development (LTAD) protocol — and it applies to every person as they go through the developmental process, not just people who will become elite athletes — these movements are staples.

Treadmills

They are awfully convenient, but what most people don’t realize is that they can make your movement patterns worse, so when I say go out and run and jump and play, I’m not necessarily recommending that you go to the gym this afternoon, hop on a treadmill and call that running.

On a treadmill you are required to ‘keep up’ with the mill, which negates any push-off and ground-reaction forces so you end up with really over-developed quads and under-developed hamstrings and glutes which serve to ‘pull’ you through your stride.

The stability required of your calves is also reduced, so you end up with gross muscle imbalances in the majority of circumstances with too much treadmill work, and thus increased injury potential.

This all greatly alters how you run and your technique for when you run naturally again.

This isn’t to say you can’t do it from time to time, I have had some fairly elite runners do some work on the treadmill from time to time for instance because speed work and/or tempo work is easy to do on a treadmill —though it’s still not really my first choice…

What I am saying is use a treadmill sparingly and your knees, ankles and low back will thank you for it.

Go run outside, preferably on soft surfaces like turf, track or grass, even sand, if you’re not training for a marathon type event. Use natural surfaces where ever possible.

Use tights and other cold weather gear in winter if plausible.

If you absolutely must use a treadmill, I recommend the ‘Curve‘ by a company called Woodway, because it is self-powered and is currently the next best thing to running outside.

The Curve forces you to create ground reaction forces the most similar to running outside, it is your stride that gets the belt started and keeps it going at whatever speed you can manage.

If unavailable — and most likely it is, as this is a fairly new type of treadmill not yet in a lot of gyms — then Woodway makes very good high speed treadmills that handle abuse and distribute force WAY better than most commercial treadmills or home treadmills.

Downside here is that the high powered Woodway’s are very expensive and still rather elusive to find in most commercial gym facilities.

Elliptical Machines

And other so-called ‘low impact’ machines like the Gazelle, the Nordic Trek, etc…

Honestly, the fitness equipment industry has been playing into the fear of ‘high-impact’ activities with most of these styles of equipment.

Ellipticals should only be used if you have an existing condition that would prevent you from running in my opinion, or if biking, or rowing are not an option.

Why?

Because it’s not a primal movement, your body is designed to absorb and distribute forces.

Knowing how to operate an ellipitical machine is not a part of our physical development process.

It is a man-made machine, designed to take stress off the knee joint.

However, if you know anything about physics, force gets distributed somewhere it doesn’t just ‘disappear.’ It seems the place it gets transferred to is the ankles and low back, though the machine does absorb some force.

Besides that side note, the elliptical significantly alters your gait.

If you ever want to run, jog or have to move fast (i.e. run away from an accident maybe?) you will be inadequately prepared to deal with this stress because your body has altered how it moves and again increase your injury potential.

If you go back to running, your gait now leads to terrible technique. You essentially have to ‘re-learn’ how to run all over again.

These machines, also mess with your walking gait too, because you never have to roll off the big toe on the elliptical machine — which you do running and walking.

Ultimately if you’re healthy, I think you should avoid these machines as much as possible.

What About Rowers or Bikes?

I like biking and rowing.

However, you can say similar things about them as you can the elliptical.

The only difference is the they are both sports and they are both forms of transportation in some form or another.

I bike to work most days, but I also train in a way to balance out the volume of riding I do, so I don’t develop bad posture in other areas in my life — hunched over bike posture is good for performance not so good for your body the rest of your life, just ask any former competitive cyclist.

Training needs to balance out the volume of work you put through very specific and limited ranges of movement, or you increase the likelihood again of movement impairment syndromes — or movement compensation patterns in the rest of your life.

In my opinion, if you are going to do a lot of biking or rowing, you should at least maintain some quality of running (as a primal movement pattern), though you don’t have to do a lot of it to maintain the skill, maybe running as little as once a week or a few times per month.

You just need to load your joints semi-frequently, and you could use something like heavy weight training to off-set the amount of running you do as well.

If you don’t use it, you lose it, basically.

Jumping, Bounding, Skipping, etc…?

All really good movement patterns, again primal patterns that we figure out on our own.

It is more detrimental to stop them for too long than to use them appropriately.

I speak from a recent experience where I had foolishly eliminated most of these from my own training regime for far too long, focusing far too much attention strictly on weight training.

When I picked up a sport again, just for fun, my body was ill-prepared for the demands and I suffered a severe calf tear and nearly 10 months later my body has not completely recovered from (if only psychologically).

Yes, jumping, bounding and skipping are more stressful than running, but I still encourage them with the people I work with, right up to 65+ years old.

However it’s important to modify it depending on skill, for many of my older clients we do more box jumping and stick landings in various positions, with the hope that improved technique can lead to higher levels of loading.

In the likelihood that they would ever have to catch themselves quickly from falling, these drills prevent people from losing the necessary skill to decelerate high amounts of force quickly.

You have to jump (and run) at a level that is appropriate for your level of skill for it to be useful.

Not using these techniques semi-regularly, even at lower levels — pogo jumps, low box landings, drop-squats, etc… — affects the stability and reactivity of the musculature in your body too, a prime factor in quality of life as we age.

Particularly the calf and hip musculature, we want to exercise at various tempos, and running/jumping is the best way to train the explosive speed-strength component of life — a quality we lose the fastest with age along with mobility.

Skipping rope in particular, is an excellent way to maintain this quality, as it requires excellent dexterity, coordination, fast deceleration/acceleration, serves as a great cardiovascular exercise and can be used for as little as 5 minutes a workout in either a warm-up or as a workout finisher.

Recommendations:

The real reason people say ‘high-impact’ exercise is bad for you is the following:

Too much volume is done, which increases the likelihood of injury — you don’t need to run or jump 6x a week to benefit from training the pattern, jogging for an hour is a lot of repetition

Bad technique is used. Bad technique is often caused by a lack of use, lifestyle (sitting too much, or using ‘un-natural’ machines like elliptical machines alters how you move) and/or injury

The wrong or unnatural surfaces are used. Pavement, concrete and things like tile are not surfaces our bodies have adapted to utilize well yet. We are far more familiar and conditioned for running and jumping on more cushioned surfaces like grass, dirt/trails, sand and even tracks, hardwood gym floors, or some rubberized surfaces (something with some give), so unless you are planning on running marathons, I recommend you avoid hard surfaces in your training.

Bad footwear alters our gait. Of course running on hard surfaces had something to do with running shoe design, but this also made a lot of people heel strikers (try and heel strike in your bare-feet as you run, it is next to impossible). The heel lift also makes us use more quad and less hips, encouraging the faulty movement mechanics I mentioned above, and leads to potential knee problems.

Even low-impact training can be bad for your joints if you ignore technique.

I believe everybody should train running and jumping as a skill semi-regularly.

It should be planned appropriately, in tolerable loads to the individual, and thus you may need the advice of a good coach, or leave a comment and I’m happy to help.

The volume should be appropriate to your level of skill.

The style should be appropriate to your level of skill — you can do a few 10-40m runs with rest intervals, once a week or a few times a month even if you maintain the skill.

You should use non-loading exercises like elliptical machines, bikes or rowers mostly if you have a pre-existing medical condition (i.e. are not considered healthy, and it is recommended by your rehab specialist or doctor).

Unless of course you compete in biking or rowing sports, in which case your training should balance the demands of those sports through other means (mobility and strength training).

If you are healthy, you should use these modalities sparingly and not at the expense of losing your primal movement patterns, which you will use in your every day life at some point, even if you don’t mean to deliberately.

I’m not saying, don’t bike, don’t use the elliptical or don’t row.

They are good for your cardiovascular health still, just be aware that they alter gait with too much use and you need to train to bring your body back into your neutral position. (i.e. biking, train the posterior chain more to compensate for the forward posture).

There is more to fitness than just your cardiovascular fitness…

I know this article was a mouthful, so if you have any questions about any of this, please leave a comment and I’m happy to help.

What most diet gurus fail to mention in their metabolism bossting secret workouts, is that metabolism is an excruciatingly complex topic, and anyone who claims to know the ins and outs of everything metabolism is mostly full of shit.

Here is a tiny fraction of the chemical processes that add up to metabolism in the human body:

This includes all the things on the above list and the billions (maybe trillions) of other chemical reactions that take place in your body every day.

Where it gets confusing is that most people confuse metabolism with basal metabolism AKA resting metabolism.

Or your basal metabolic rate AKA resting metabolic rate.

Basal metabolism is the minimum level of energy expenditure the body needs in order to maintain the vital functions within the body.

Unless you’ve had a basal metabolic assessment, which utilizes oxygen exchange to discern your resting metabolism by breathing into a tube for a period of time, you probably don’t actually know whether your metabolism is fast or slow.

If you lived a completely sedentary life, didn’t eat and stayed at a constant temperature your basal metabolism and your complete metabolism would be pretty darn close in terms of energy expenditure.

Basal metabolism is the biggest chunk of total metabolism in an average day at about 70-75% of your total metabolism and is really beyond your control on a day to day basis.

i.e. you’re generally not going to be able to change your basal metabolism in a day but it is also constantly in flux.

We all hear things like adding muscle to your body increases your metabolism, it does, but the mechanism is through your basal metabolism, because lean tissues are more metabolically active than non-lean tissues like fat.

An extra kilogram of muscle is typically expected to help you burn an extra 10-13 or so extra calories at rest per day.

Now this doesn’t seem like a lot, but assuming you don’t change the amount of energy you take in, if you add it up over the course of a year, suddenly you’ve lost about 3500 calories — the amount typically quantified as a pound of fat, which is also only really a partial truth — doing nothing but being ‘your-bad-self’ with a kilogram more of lean mass.

The confusing part comes when we also hear that merely exercising increases your metabolism, and this is where some clarification is needed.

See, adding lean tissue means that your metabolism requires more energy in a day for doing nothing really outside of maintaining your vital functions, and that newly acquired muscle is now determined to be a vital bodily function.

This means your energy requirements are now larger at rest, and hence you have a ‘faster’ resting metabolism, as the kids like to say.

Exercise on the other hand, any kind of exercise, will boost your general or overall metabolism that day by utilizing additional energy above and beyond your basic needs.

Both are good for you.

Exercise

The first thing most people consider when the topic of metabolism comes up is exercise, which is an easy way to increase it, true.

However, like most things, it isn’t really that simple, now that you understand the difference between resting metabolism and metabolism, let’s talk exercise.

Remember that adding muscle does mean boosting your metabolism.

If you’re going to exercise, and I recommend that you do — in combination with some dietary changes, see below — you want to add exercise that gives you a spectrum of metabolically boosting effects.

If you lift weights, over time you’ll add some muscle, boosting your resting metabolism, and everybody can go home happy.

However you also need to consider the principle of progressive overload, so try to lift a little more each time until you can’t, then try some new lifts.

You can also change the repetition ranges you work with but for muscle gains I generally stick between 6-12 repetitions per exercise.

You can add tensile strength lifting in a 3-6 rep range too though, so don’t completely ignore higher or lower intensity training, increasing your ligament, tendon and bone strength is also ‘lean mass,’ so it is also more metabolically active than stored fat.

It also gives you a better frame for muscle building too.

Basically, if your body becomes acclimatized to lifting, it stops adapting, so mix things up every 3-6 weeks.

Think back to science class in high school, organisms adapt to stimulus only when the stimulus exceeds a certain threshold of initial tolerance.

However, energy system training shouldn’t be ignored either, just because it doesn’t have as big an output on resting metabolism, doesn’t mean it isn’t useful.

I prefer interval training over the more traditional long, slower distance exercise stuff, but I’m also a fairly busy guy.

You don’t need as much of that as you may think for heart health, but you can still do it — I ride my bike almost daily for about 20 minutes at a low intensity and I walk a lot.

Long slow endurance exercise also gets the short-end of the stick when it comes to long-term contribution because it doesn’t really contribute much to your metabolism once exercise has been completed.

It has other advantages though, it aids in recovery, contributes to heart health — making the heart bigger and stronger — and can give you a nice jolt of endorphins — if you’re resting heart rate first thing in the morning is above 60 BPM consistently, you might consider doing more of this style of exercise.

Scientists use Post-Exercise Oxygen Consumption as a method of measure for metabolic changes post-exercise or EPOC and the more intense your energy system work is the more prolonged this additional metabolic boost is — it’s about 1-36 hours depending on the research you look at and the type of exercise used, you get a longer effect for higher intensity exercise and little to no additional effect for low intensity slow distance exercise, it’s a spectrum.

Interval training is a higher intensity, so you get a little more damage, a little more necessary recovery and a little longer post-workout metabolic boost, which is why I generally favour it as ‘exercise.’

I also like it because the additional rest can keep the quality of the exercise high and the technical execution more precise.

Weight training is right up on that end of the spectrum too, hence why it generally makes sense to try an add a little muscle to your frame, even if you’re objectives are weight loss.

Your daily activity (including exercise and other additional movements in the day) contributes anywhere from 15-30% of total daily metabolism, depending on how active you are and again is a separate issue from resting metabolism.

Eating

So I’ll give you to coles notes on all those books above, if you really want to boost your metabolism, all you have to do is just eat more and exercise more, though most of those books will tell you to eat less, even though eating boosts metabolism, as we’ll get to in a second.

Problem solved, I have answered the riddle of fitness metabolism.

Not exactly, I’m assuming that if you’re here, you probably have a weight loss ambition, and most of those books probably assume that too.

Eating more and exercising more doesn’t affect the amount of energy your body needs for it’s vital functions or it’s resting metabolism, just your total metabolism.

Eating can have a significant effect on your total metabolism, with the act of digestion contributing about 10% of your total metabolism each day.

Where things can get sticky, is that while eating increases your metabolism, it doesn’t matter how often you eat, contrary to popular opinion.

There has been a myth floating around the internetz for nearly a decade that suggests eating more frequently will boost your metabolism.

Unfortunately the theory never really held up because increasing your metabolism via food, occurs due to the thermic effect of food (TEF) and TEF remains the same no matter how frequently you eat, provided the actual type (macronutrients) and total quantity of food you consume is exactly the same that day.

Your overal macronutrient ratios are what’s important — though it’s not entirely that simple, there is variance in contribution between different types of protein, different types of fat and different types of carbohydrates; the easiest to explain is the difference between sugar and starch, obviously sugar is more easily digested even though both are carbohydrates.

If you have one large 2000 calorie meal, or 4 smaller 500 calorie meals, as long as the total food consumed is the same, the result on your metabolism is identical because your body responds to the total load per day — and actually the way your body averages it out is arguably over a few days to perhaps a week or more even.

Even though the meal frequency thing is a myth, the basics of TEF can be still be applied, you just need to do so by focusing on the quality of the food you consume, rather than the frequency.

Basically your body has to use energy to breakdown food and absorb it.

In the case of fat your body uses roughly 3 kcal to digest about 100 kcal.

For carbohydrates it’s a little more, about 7 kcal for every 100 kcal you ingest.

Protein though, is through the roof, relatively speaking, it requires closer 30 kcal to digest every 100 kcal of this macronutrient.

Now most research has some variance on those numbers but just know that protein has the greatest TEF, carbs second, fat last.

The more whole the source, the bigger the boost and although eating many things raw can also increase the TEF of that food, some foods should still be cooked — like potatoes, beets, squash, poultry, many cruciferous veggies, etc…

This will use up a little more energy each day, while you eat and thus ‘boost’ your metabolism, by displacing macronutrients and forcing your body to work a little harder to digest a certain type.

Eating itself also merely increases your metabolism for the day.

So Person A, who eats 6000 calories a day, has a higher total metabolism, than Person B, who eats 3000 calories a day, even if their resting metabolisms are exactly the same.

Size and Temperature

Overall size also contributes to basal metabolism, the larger you are the faster your basal metabolism typically is — outside of some very rare hormonal issues.

If you’re 260 and it’s mostly muscle, you’ll obviously have a faster metabolism than someone who is 260 and mostly fat.

However, chances are that if you’re 260 worth of fat and someone else is 220, your metabolism is actually probably faster than theirs.

Hopefully that makes you rethink a stigma surrounding the weight loss industry; That being overweight means you have a slower metabolism.

Often it actually does not, so don’t let that notion stop you from adding some metabolic boosts to your day via quality nutrition and exercise, you can still make the changes anybody else can.

However, outside of getting a Basal Assessment — and if you have the financial means I’d recommend it — there is also some loose data suggesting that body temperature can co-relate with your resting metabolic rate.

I don’t use this with my own clients but if metabolism is a concern and you’d like to know if you’re impacting it, it might be a useful rough guide.

Try tracking your temperature every morning upon walking; a good resting metabolism should typically put you around 98.2 degrees Fahrenheit or 36.8 degree Celsius at the start of the day.

However, circadian rhythm can influence this as it alters your body temperature to suit your sleep cycle, so if you’re on the low end try tracking more throughout the day to see how your temperature fluctuates.

Typically your body temperature will be at it’s peak at about 10-11 AM — depending on when you typically wake, but about 3-4 hours after waking — and 7-8 PM — again depending upon when you typically go to bed, but about 3-4 hours before you go to sleep.

Body temperature is at it’s lowest roughly 2-3 hours before we wake, so your morning temperature might be lower than you expect.

You may also see a dip in temperature after lunch from about 1-3 PM. Based on that it might be worthwhile to check every 3-4 hours for a few days and gauge where your circadian rhythm is taking you.

*Note body temperature does not always correlate with basal metabolism in research, which is why I’d recommend a Basal Metabolic Assessment as a preference (far more accurate).

So…

I know this may come as a big surprise to people but the main factors that contribute to metabolism within our daily control are eating and exercise.

There are more specifics we know of, such as thyroid hormone and it’s involvement in the regulation of metabolism — and other mechanisms, but without medical testing it’s nearly impossible to know what specifically could be affecting you.

If your basal metabolic test seems low, relative to your body mass and body fat %, then it may be worthwhile to get some blood tests and consult your doctor.

Likewise, if you have a consistently low body temperature, this may(emphasis mine) mean you should consider a blood test and consult a doctor too.

Less than 2% of the population has any problem with their thyroid conversion and/or production, and most of that can be attributed to Iodine deficiency, and/or can be dealt with via nutrition (a clinical dietician is recommended in these circumstances).

So be realistic in your assumption of a ‘slow metabolism’ before you fall victim to the nocebo effect, essentially believing you have something you probably don’t.

Now too much eating won’t be good for weight loss — even though it increases metabolism — and too much exercise won’t be good for weight loss potentially either — too much can cause things like adrenal fatigue — so play it safe, hopefully take some of my advice and this post has gone on long enough.